Schooled

Floramundi Donnelly, Flora for short, is the social worker called in to deliver Capricorn to his assigned foster family. However, Mrs. Donnelly herself had spent part of her childhood at Garland Farm, and she immediately realizes that Capricorn needs to be placed with someone who understands his experiences of growing up on a commune. When she looks at Capricorn, she does not see a case, “but a time traveler, about to step into a world that had forgotten the sixties except for J.F.K. and the Beatles” (11).

At first, Capricorn refuses to leave Rain and go home with Mrs. Donnelly. Mrs. Donnelly uses the fact that she knows Rain and spent time at Garland Farm as a child to gain Capricorn’s trust. What she does not tell Capricorn is that as a child she had always been afraid of Rain, and thought of her as a witch. Capricorn reluctantly leaves with Mrs. Donnelly.

Zach Powers has spent the last two years waiting for the moment when everybody in the school will look up to him. Now he is in the “eighth grade, captain of the football and soccer teams, Big Man on Campus” (13). When he gets to school, he sees that the administration has fixed the school sign that he had previously vandalized. After making sure that no teachers are looking, he removes the letter “L” in CLAVERAGE, so that instead of “WELCOME TO CLAVERAGE MIDDLE SCHOOL,” the sign reads, “WELCOME TO C AVERAGE MIDDLE SCHOOL” (13). “C Average” is how the students refer to the school.

Part of Zach’s plan to maintain his place as top dog in the school is to carry on the tradition of nominating “the biggest loser in the building” (14) for eighth grade president. The idea is that no one runs against “the loser” and then all year the student body gets “the pleasure of watching President Bonehead giving speeches, running assemblies, and making a complete idiot out of himself” (14). Zach is planning on nominating Hugh Winkleman, a “primo nerd, bar none” (15), who has been “on the receiving end of so many wedgies that he had elastic waistband material fused to the top of his head” (15). But when Mr. Kasigi, the assistant principal, asks Zach to show a new student to his locker and homeroom, Zach finds a new candidate for president: “Hugh Winkleman, you’re a lucky man. With the arrival of this new kid, all the losers in school were bumped down one space. Never before had anyone screamed for the job of eighth grade president like Capricorn Anderson” (17).

Capricorn witnesses his first fight ever. He has read about violence but has never seen it until the two boys fight outside the school. When a teacher breaks up the fight, Capricorn asks the witnesses who started the fight. Capricorn, not versed in middle school’s unspoken rule against snitching on fellow students, does not think twice about telling the teacher what happened: “Buttface wanted to know what jerkface was looking at, and jerkface wanted to know what buttwipe was looking at” (19). The teacher, assuming that Capricorn is making fun of him, sends Capricorn to Mr. Kasigi’s office. Before Mr. Kasigi calls Capricorn into the office, Mrs. Donnelly shows up and takes him to see Rain.

Rain’s surgery has been a success, but Rain informs Capricorn that he is going to have to stay with Mrs. Donnelly and continue attending Claverage Middle School until she is well enough to go back to Garland Farm. Rain takes some responsibility for not giving Capricorn the tools that he needs to operate in greater society. She does not think much of the outside world, but she realizes that he is going to have to learn how to make his way in it. When Capricorn tells Rain that he’s scared, his grandmother is sympathetic.

Mrs. Donnelly comes to the hospital room to pick up Capricorn. Rain remembers “Floramundi” from when she was a child on the farm. Capricorn senses the tension between the two women and mistakenly assumes it’s because Mrs. Donnelly is sad about having had to leave the commune.

Mrs. Donnelly takes Capricorn back to the home she shares with her 16-year-old daughter, Sophie. Sophie resents her mother for bringing “that freakazoid” (24) home. Sophie is scared that Capricorn will scare off Josh Weintraub, the guy she likes: “What’s he going to think when he drives up and sees this tie-dyed streak of misery draped across the porch?” (25).

It does not help matters when Capricorn mistakenly goes into Sophie’s room while she is lying on her bed and talking on the phone, with green moisturizer slathered all over her face. Sophie screams for him to get out, which he does: “There I stood, still facing her door, paralyzed with discovery. Beauty. That was precisely the word that had been haunting me. Sophie Donnelly was beautiful” (25).

Hugh Winkleman thinks that grownups who try to conduct studies to understand kids are wasting their time: “If you want to understand middle school students, there’s only one way to do it: follow the wedgies. Wedgie-givers and wedgie-receivers” (27). Having been bullied by the likes of Zack Powers since kindergarten, Hugh could write a dissertation on the power dynamics in a school setting.

As soon as Hugh sees Capricorn, he knows that this student is going to be on the receiving end of wedgies:

He wasn’t nerdy in a typical way. He wasn’t a computer geek or captain of the chess club […] He couldn’t even speak Klingon; in fact, he’d never even heard of Star Trek. But just one peek at the guy and you knew that, dweebwise, there was a new sheriff in town (28).

Hugh sits with Capricorn, who is eating alone in the cafeteria. He tries to give Capricorn the lay of the land, offering pointers on how to survive school. Pointing to Zach, Lena, and their friends, Hugh explains:

That crowd thinks they own the place. They think that because they do. They’ll chop you up and press you into salami […] And you definitely don’t want anything to do with goths, burnouts, skateboarders, hip-hop kids, environmentalists, or anyone who has a baseball cap on backwards (28-29).

When Capricorn tells Hugh that he has always been homeschooled, Hugh is jealous, imagining a learning environment free of all the pitfalls he has been subjected to for the last eight years. Hugh’s suspicion that Capricorn will replace him as the main target for Zach and his friends is confirmed when Mr. Kasigi’s voice is heard over the PA system:

Just a reminder—the election for eighth grade president will be held on Tuesday, September twenty-sixth. The position is open to all eighth graders. So far, only one name has been placed in nomination—Capricorn Anderson (30).

Hugh considers warning Capricorn to run to the office and take his name out of the running, but self-preservation takes over. If Capricorn does not become the eighth grade president, Zach and his crowd will turn their attention back on Hugh.

Naomi Erlanger wants to be Zach Powers’s girlfriend. At the moment, he seems more interested in their friend, Lena, but Naomi’s not worried. Not only does she think that Zach will realize that Lena lacks depth, but Lena herself is more interested in Darryl Pennyfield and a guy named Grant Tubman, as long as he loses the tongue stud.

It is hard for Naomi to compete with Lena because Lena is “so naturally pretty and ha[s] a very strong personality” (33). Since Naomi is a little shyer than Lena, “and not quite so willing to squeeze into size-zero jeans and apply makeup with a snow blower” (34), she feels like she has to “try a little harder to get Zach’s attention” (34).

Naomi’s plan is to help Zach with his plan to elect and then humiliate the new eighth grade president, Capricorn Anderson. When Capricorn wins the election, unopposed, Zach and Darryl carry Capricorn on their shoulders up to the stage, in front of all 1,100 students. When Capricorn says he does not understand how he can be the president if he does not know everyone’s name, Zach insists that he has to learn every student’s name. Naomi feels sorry for Capricorn, but keeps it to herself; she does not want to ruin her chances with Zach.

They also torment Capricorn by saying he has to deliver press briefings, and then scheduling those briefings in nonexistent rooms, so that Capricorn wastes time traversing the halls, lost. Zach, who remembers Capricorn’s locker combination, makes sure there is a nasty surprise every time he opens his locker. When Zach puts a dead bird in the locker, Capricorn takes it outside to bury it. Touched, Naomi joins him. She hopes that when Zach becomes her boyfriend, she can “make him as sensitive as Capricorn Anderson” (43).

When Mrs. Donnelly checks in with Mr. Kasigi to see how Capricorn is doing in school, she finds out that Capricorn has been made eighth grade president. She does not understand how someone brand new to the school could win an election, so Sophie explains it to her: “Duh—eighth grade president isn’t an honor, Mother. It’s like being elected village idiot” (45).

Sophie admits that when she was in middle school, she did nothing to stop her eighth grade president, Caitlin Tortolo, from being tormented, until Caitlin finally left school due to a nervous breakdown. According to Sophie, “If you don’t go along with the gag, you’re next” (46). As concerned as Mrs. Donnelly is for Capricorn, she still thinks that a regular middle school, “nasty and merciless as it could be” (47), beats Garland Farm.

Home life is not much better than school. Sophie takes offense at everything that Capricorn does, especially his early-morning Tai Chi exercises on the front lawn. Finally, she dumps a wastebasket of water on him from an upstairs window. Mrs. Donnelly tries to comfort Capricorn, telling him that it’s not about him. Sophie’s father has been breaking promises to Sophie on a regular basis, including saying that he’ll take her out for driving lessons and then not doing so. She explains to Capricorn that Sophie is just taking her anger out on him.

Capricorn misses Rain. He has always relied on her to explain anything he doesn’t understand. He remembers an occasion when they went into town and stopped at the hardware store to stock up on duct tape. Duct tape is used for everything on the farm: “It repaired roofs, walls, pipes, cars, furniture, and boots” (50). It also served as a cast for broken fingers, pulled splinters out, and when there were babies and toddlers on the farm, duct tape held their diapers together. When Rain and Capricorn got to the hardware store, they saw that the workers were on strike. Rain explained that the strikers were marching to get better treatment and fair wages, and she refused to cross the picket line. Instead, they drove out of their way to another hardware store for their duct tape and then came back to march with the strikers.

Zach and Naomi set up a suggestion box for the eighth grade president and stuff it with outlandish recommendations. One suggestion is to have bullfighting at the school. Once Capricorn learns what bullfighting is, he feels like he needs Rain there to explain why anyone would want to have anything to do with such a violent sport. Since she is not there, Capricorn is forced to make his own decision, and objects to the bullfighting suggestion “on moral grounds” (52).

In the absence of Rain, Capricorn relies on Hugh to explain some of the school happenings that he does not understand. For example, Capricorn wants to know why a girl named Lorelai Lumley (really Naomi) writes him letters about wanting to run her fingers through his hair. He also wants to know what the best Halloween dance is, and what his role is in planning it. Hugh does his best to clue his new friend in to the ways of middle school, but it is all counterintuitive to Capricorn.

Capricorn tries to deal with the stress by meditating in front of his locker, but his sandals get stolen and he is forced to take the bus home, barefoot. The bus gives Capricorn a better understanding of why Rain and her friends left San Francisco back in the late 1960s: “The dark underbelly of the human animal was turned loose on that vehicle” (54).

Capricorn feels bad for Sophie. He knows now that the dirty looks she gives him stem from the fact that she is continually let down by her father. Capricorn wants to make her feel better but does not know how.

Sophie blames her mother’s good-heartedness for Capricorn being in their home. She is embarrassed by how he looks and everything he does. When the boy she wants to date sees Capricorn near their house, Sophie tells him that Capricorn is homeless. But Capricorn eventually starts to win Sophie over by taking her for a driving lesson.

No matter what mistakes Sophie makes while driving, Capricorn remains unfazed. He even remains calm when Sophie panics and keeps her foot on the gas pedal as she mistakenly turns off of the road and heads straight toward a garage door:

[Capricorn] reached over and yanked on the steering wheel. We swung around, the tires of the Saturn churning soft earth as we plowed into a flower bed. The rough ride slowed us down long enough for him to reach over and shift into park. The car lurched to a halt (60).

When Sophie wants to quit driving, Capricorn does not let her and guides her back home. On the way, Sophie sees her mother walking in the neighborhood. Sophie tells Capricorn that if they get caught driving without a license, she will be grounded until she is 40 and he will be sleeping on the street. They switch spots, and Capricorn coolly navigates the back roads back to their house. The two sprint in through the back door, making it inside before Mrs. Donnelly gets home. To avoid making Flora suspicious, Sophie insults Capricorn, but for the first time, her “heart just wasn’t in it” (63).